> Red_Rooster wrote:

> "What the US is fighting is very simple: the INTENDED use of violence and threats AGAINST CIVILIANS to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes"

Ok but tell me this, when the allied powers carpet bombed germany, was that not terrorism? When napalm bombs was used to burn whole forests down in vietnam, was that not terrorism? And also why does it matter if it was intentional or not? The U.S. goes to war for no reason and accidentally drops bombs on civilians and kills them. Terrorists hijack planes and put bombs in subways. Which one is worse? If I was a civilian either way I would be terrorized. The only difference is the U.S. does this in a larger scale.

1: Agreed.  Intentional civilian bombing is bad!  Now, I would argue one exception to this: When, in a utilitarian calculus, one can find:
A: That the civilians lost in an attack are less than what would be saved WITHIN THAT NATION'S POPULATION (so, if more German civilians would be saved by bombing a German civilian factory than had it been left alone, it is just.  Protecting one's own civilians by killing another nation's civilians is not just, because it only creates apprehension by the other nation's population, whereas in the former example, people are more likely to say "you're bad, but they're worse."  After all, if the US were to go into Sudan and stop a massive genocide, yet one bomb accidentally killed a civilian, would we be "just as bad" as the government committing the genocide?), and
2: No alternative method exists to achieve approximately equivalent results.

Now let's go to your charges one at a time:

Vietnam: Agree 100%.  Bad US.  However, question: Does an event that occurred... 40 years ago... define the US today?

German carpet bombing: Hold up!  The German government was conducting a massive genocide against its own civilian population.  Therefore, by stopping the government, the US is creating a net beneficial protection of the German citizenship.
Now, I also have to win that there was no alternative method... but it's simple: Germany's war machine was fueled by its economic growth... you had to hit their economy to stop their growth.
Iraq: You really want to get into the debate of whether Iraq was justified?  Honestly?  Say yes, and I'll bring it.

As for accidental bombs... honestly, you're going to argue that an accidental bomb is the same as an intentional attack?  So if you are driving, and your brakes stall, causing you to accidentally kill someone, you just murdered them?

> 'This also separates terrorists from so-called "freedom fighters."'

Ok so you are saying freedom fighters do not kill civilians? In the conflict of sri lanka vs ltte, LTTE uses suicide bombs and goes into markets and kills 20-30 people at a time. The sri lanka government surrounds 200,000 civilians and starves them to death at a time. What is worse is that the sri lanka government receives LARGE amounts of weapons from the major powers of the world like India and China in the name of 'defeating terrorism.'

Then those people are terrorists who only claim a "freedom fighter" title.  A true "freedom fighter" does not target civilians.  Simple. 

"And one more thing... Who ever said military-level foreign relations WASN'T hypocritical?"

This is true but it frustrates me when a lot of people assume that anyone who uses suicide bombs are terrorists. There is no such thing as a freedom movement to these people. All governments are saints and all non-governmental military forces are demons that need to be wiped out.

Fair enough.  If you can accept that international military relations are a realist issue (that being that each nation is looking out primarily for their own interests, and that, for example, the US promotes democracy primarily because it feels democracy is a tool for peace and better economic benefits, rather than an end in itself), then we're pretty much in agreement in the end.